I can appeal to negative externalities at this point, and I have evidence for them too.
Such as?
I can certainly list negative consequences of the false belief being widespread (and “official”). For example, currently companies must either hire unqualified people or risk being accused to racism and/or sexism since they’re workplace ratios don’t match those of the general population. People attempting to create alternate accreditation systems regularly get sued on disparate impact grounds.
It’s not universal feature of modern liberal democracies -it is mostly an issue in the US.
You may have heard of a country called India, which had a racism problem that seems worse than the American one, and which attempted to counteract it with affirmative action, beginning over a century ago. The opponents of AA have had their predictions validated, and the proponents of AA have mostly had their predictions disconfirmed, by the Indian experience.
Sure. Here’s an article from the Economist, but Thomas Sowell also wrote a book about the issue called Affirmative Action Around the World. I should also note that the national reservation system is not quite a century old yet, but reservation systems of some sort have existed for longer.
I should note that I am a fan of the policy that ‘affirmative action’ originally described- that is, taking action to affirm the government’s commitment to meritocracy over bias, in order to counteract the self-fulfilling prophecy of people not applying because they don’t expect to be hired or promoted on racial grounds- and am a strong opponent of reservation systems that ‘affirmative action’ is now used to describe. Officially, reservation systems are illegal in the US- but it’s hard to see how one should interpret ‘disparate impact’ any other way. (‘Disparate treatment’ is the American word for anti-meritocratic bias, and so American systems have to be a tortured mess that is not too meritocratic (or it’s racist) or too anti-meritocratic (or it’s racist).)
A handful of claims:
AA is a temporary fix / AA is a permanent fixture of society:
It proposed that the policy exist for a decade to see what progress would be made, but without spelling out how to measure it. The provision has been renewed without fuss every decade since.
(On this subject, reading Sotomayor’s questioning during affirmative action cases that come before the Supreme Court is an… interesting experience.)
AA will not lead to loss of quality / AA will increase corruption and decrease meritocracy:
Worse, the policy has probably helped to make India’s bureaucracy increasingly rotten—and it was already one of the country’s greater burdens. An obsession with making the ranks of public servants representative, not capable, makes it too hard to sack dysfunctional or corrupt bureaucrats. Nor will this improve. In December 2012 parliament’s upper house passed a bill ordering that bureaucrats be promoted not on merit alone, but to lift the backward castes faster.
AA will decrease resentment between groups / AA will increase resentment between groups:
For secondary schooling state funds help to encourage more Dalit and tribal children into classrooms; the effect of setting aside special places in colleges and university is to lower the marks needed by Dalit and other backward applicants.
That causes resentment among general applicants, who vie for extremely competitive spots in medical, business and other colleges.
(One weird quirk of psychology, here: suppose there are 10 slots, and 100 applicants, 10% of which are Dalit, so one of the slots is reserved for a Dalit. If the top Dalit scores 20th best on the test, numbers 10 through 19 all feel as though they have been deprived by the Dalit taking the 10th slot, even though number 10 is the only person actually deprived.)
AA will lead to homogeneity and acceptance / AA will lead to heteogeneity and perpetuate divisions.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an academic at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, favours affirmative action but concludes that a policy focused on distribution of limited state resources is bound to fail. “The current system is not about equal opportunity, it is about distributing the spoils of state power strictly according to caste, thus perpetuating it”, he says.
The benefits will go to the poorest and most deserving / The benefits will go to the richest and least deserving.
The Economist article doesn’t discuss this directly, but others (that I don’t have time to find now) do. There’s a ‘creamy layer’ provision to try to prevent the richest of the Other Backwards Castes from benefiting (to convert to an American example, if your parents are millionaires, you probably don’t need AA consideration even if you’re black) but this does not apply to the Scheduled Castes (Dalits). The hypothetical highest scoring Dalit mentioned earlier almost certainly comes from a rich Dalit family, and by looking at the subdivision within caste of the various beneficiaries of reservations it’s been shown that the majority come from the SCs that were already privileged within the SCs.
Thankyou for that information. Note that I am arguing against the proposition. “The world is getting more irrational, which we can tell from the rise of affirmative action, which is clearly irrational.”.
I don’t have any strong commitment to AA. I only need to argue that it is not clearly irrational. It may nonetheless be mistaken in subtle way that takes decades of empirical evidence to detect.
What’s irrational is the belief (or rather alief) that anyone arguing that the cause of the observed differences in intelligence by race isn’t caused by white racism (or for that matter anyone pointing out said difference who doesn’t immediately attribute it to white racism) is an EVIL RACIST. AA is just one consequence of this irrationality.
Nothing, outside mathematics is obvious 2+2=5 irrational. Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
South Africa, 1994. For the previous several decades, the government policy has been something called Apartheid; which can be briefly summarised as, the white people get all the nice stuff, the coloured people get okay stuff, and black people get pretty much the stuff no-one else wants, including (for by far the majority) severely substandard education specifically designed to prevent them from having the mental tools to escape their economic dead-end. The system is maintained partially by the fact that ‘all the nice stuff’ includes the right to vote.
Recently, the government has caved in and allowed everyone to vote. Predictably, they are voted out and a new government is voted in, determined to undo the damage of Apartheid. They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there’s plenty of educated black people—generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas—but they’re a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
In such circumstances, would you think that a temporary bout of Affirmative Action would be a rational response by the new government?
They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there’s plenty of educated black people—generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas—but they’re a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
Ignoring for the moment the question of genetic differences in intelligence, the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites. These problems are not getting resolved quickly and until they are it makes sense for the white minority to be in an economically superior position. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren’t qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
Note, however, if your only goal is to redress the power balance between whites and blacks, Zimbabwe did in fact solve that problem, i.e., blacks are now being oppressed by fellow blacks rather than whites. Also the economy has been destroyed, so the conditions for everyone involved are much worse.
Otherwise, you’ll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren’t qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
I’m not an expert on Zimbabwean history by any means, but this doesn’t quite seem to add up. According to World Bank data, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has lagged sub-Saharan Africa (never mind the rest of the world) in per-capita GDP (measured in constant 2000 dollars) since at least 1960. As you can see from the graph, there’s no dramatic discontinuity coinciding with the end of the Bush War; there is a decline over the war years themselves, but I’d attribute that more to the damage done by a markedly nasty civil conflict. It later stops tracking Africa’s broader economic performance around 2001, but that timeframe seems to coincide with Robert Mugabe’s land redistribution programs and involvement in the Congo War: a specific case of mismanagement by a notorious dictator, twenty years after the changes you’re alluding to.
I’d consider this more conclusive if I’d been able to find data going back further. Still, if Rhodesia had qualified as an advanced economy, I’d have expected better than $500 GDP/capita in 1960 -- and if it was the removal of Zimbabwe’s white minority’s political influence that had screwed everything up, I’d have expected a decline starting around 1978, not the minor increase and quick plateau that we observe.
the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites.
That is a large part of the fundamental problem, yes. A lot of blacks were also:
Unable to pay for a proper education
Without a house of their own
Without ready access to electricity or proper sanitation
And the education problem is made worse by the fact that there were not enough properly qualified teachers in the country to deliver that education to everyone.
And you are right, these problems are not going to get resolved quickly. (It’s twenty years later now, and a lot of the problems still haven’t been resolved). It’s probably going to take two, maybe three generations minimum to get the country back on an even keel again.
But, in short, Apartheid was an incredibly unbalanced system. The inequalities caused and perpetuated during the Apartheid years were massive, dwarfing any possible genetic differences in intelligence. And, in the face of those inequalities, it seems to me that a temporary program of affirmative action (defined as, if there are muliple qualified applicants for a position, bias the selection process in the direction of the black applicants if present) is a reasonable measure to try to counteract those inequalities without sabotaging the country’s economy.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years. On the same time scales it took countries to transition out of feudalism, I’d assume any difference that affirmative action would have on South Africa would be absolutely dwarfed by hundreds of years of technological progress.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years.
In any particular country, no, not really. The important switches (e.g. the ability of commoners to obtain education beyond primary school) happen much more quickly. However we have a current example: China. Over the last thirty years or so there has been a massive influx of former peasants (without “proper education”) out of the countryside into the industrial workforce and into the cities. Funny how no one suggests there should be an affirmative action program for them.
EHeller’s got the main point, here; we kindof want the transition to go a little faster than ‘centuries’. If we’re careful, we can hopefully make the transition happen in merely a two or three generations, instead.
(Then, of course, Affirmative Action will need to be stopped—which is probably going to be quite a political battle, involving lots of shouting an arguments in Parliament. And hopefully no more than that.)
Yes, that’s also a possibility. There’s the very visible example of Zimbabwe to show what not to do, of course; I’m not saying that there won’t be a mess-up, but if there is a mess-up I’m pretty sure it’ll at least be a different mess-up.
Google doesn’t know which of those arguments make any sense at all and which are complete bollocks, so locating the former specifically isn’t that trivial.
I don’t think so, because “there is an argument for ,X, but it is not good” makes sense.
There is however a tendency to slide down a slope from “no argument” to “no good argument” to “no argument I like”.
See implicature and “When Truth Isn’t Enough”. If there are arguments for X but they are all bad, “there are arguments for X” is technically true, but misleading, and not terribly relevant to whether X is obviously wrong.
As for the specific case of AA, I agree it’s neither as obviously right as banning murder nor as obviously wrong as banning glasses (to steal examples from “Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs” on Yvain’s blog), otherwise it would either be uncontroversially implemented everywhere or something no-one ever seriously proposed (other than the kind of mentally ill dictators who ban banknotes in denominations not a multiple of 9), but to treat this as something very informative about AA is the fallacy of gray.
(There are good arguments for banning glasses: for example, kids might try to use them to focus sunlight to burn ants and accidentally burn their own skin instead. It’s just that arguments against banning glasses are much stronger.)
If the arguments for X are bad, you should be able to say why, and not just shift the burden:-
You’re the one who’s shifting the burned by insisting that AA isn’t obviously wrong while refusing to provide any arguments for it. Whereas arguments against AA have been provided by me and others in this thread.
Furthermore, I’d like to remind you that this thread started because I cited opposition to AA as an example of a practical application of a certain fact about reality (namely racial differences in intelligence), which you were attempting to argue had no practical applications and thus suppressing it wasn’t irrational. (At least that’s my attempt to steel-man your position.)
There are arguments for AA which are know to everybody who knows even a little about the subject.
Its not rational for me to study AA in detail because it is not an issue in my life. One of my 5 or 6 arguments against using AA as a proxy for irrationality is that it is a very localised issue.
A standard argument for AA is that it is form of recompense. Standard arguments against it are that it makes the economy inefficient, or interferes in freedom. These arguments tacitly make value judgements...that freedom is more (or less) valuable than justice. However, people arent irrational just because they make
different value judgements to you. Unless you can argue that there is one rational set of values.
One of my 5 or 6 arguments against using AA as a proxy for irrationality
Who was arguing for using it as a proxy for irrationality?
A standard argument for AA is that it is form of recompense.
This isn’t really a viable argument because:
1) This argument relies on collective justice, something its supporters otherwise oppose.
2) It’s not clear what is supposedly being recompensed. If the answer is slavery and/or past discriminatory policies why does it apply to recent immigrants from Africa? Why isn’t it being applied to other groups, e.g., Irish, Jews, Asians that were subject to such policies in the past. (In fact in the case of the latter two AA is functionally a continuation of said policies).
3) Pursuing highly economically inefficient policies seems a weird way to provide recompense.
This seems an unfair response to me—TheAncientGeek offers a standard argument pro-AA while admitting they haven’t studied the issue in detail. You attack the response on grounds that an AA supporter could rebut without ever contradicting themselves (i.e. “It isn’t collective justice, it compensates for individual inequality of opportunity (unless, say, you choose to define a progressive income tax as ‘collective justice’ in which case I do support collective justice)”, “It applies to certain minorities and not others because of the size of the disopportunity facing them (discriminatory social structures don’t distinguish between recent immigrants and descendants of slaves, but they do appear to discriminate between black African and white Irish)” and “It isn’t economically inefficient, and might even be economically efficient”).
The next paragraph contains an argument for AA which I support which I think proves there is at least one rational argument for AA. If it is important to you, I can also defend my position to prove to you it is not obviously wrong (although I hope the argument alone will be enough). If there is a rational argument in favour of AA, then there must be at least one utility function that makes supporting AA rational (in the same way that a utility function which really REALLY values ants might rationally choose to try to ban glasses so children can’t use them to burn ants). I don’t agree with TheAncientGeek’s starting premise that we should therefore suppress research into race, but I think it is important you don’t base your conclusion on a faulty premise (“AA is obviously wrong”).
This 2005 paper published in The Journal of Economic Education gives the result of an experiment where participants were randomly assigned a colour (‘green’ or ‘purple’) and given the following information (I’m paraphrasing badly to ensure I remain brief, please consult the paper for the actual protocol): “You are allowed to get education, which costs £1. You then take a (simulated) test where your score is randomly picked from 1 to 100, but if you bought education the score will have a small bias towards the higher end. ‘Employers’ (other participants) will then choose whether to ‘employ’ you. They only know your colour and your test score. If they employ you, you get £5. If they don’t, you get £1. If an employer picks an individual with education, the employer gets £10, otherwise they get nothing.” I presume the experiment was then iterated an unknown number of times to prevent gaming, but I can’t find that in the paper. Clearly, the socially optimal outcome is that everybody gets education and the employers employ everybody. However, individuals can earn the full £10 rather than a net £9 by gambling on the employers being over-generous and picking them even though they didn’t get education.
By chance, the ‘purples’ happened to be under-educated in the first round, which meant some purples who got an education decided not to waste the money next round. This therefore compounded the effect, to the point where new purples realised there was no point in investing in education, so even some free-riding greens couldn’t prevent employers betting on greens (even if the green score was lower than the purple score). If the society in the experiment were allowed to implement AA they would; it would be hugely more economically efficient to remove the pro-green bias and both encourage purples back into education and force greens to keep up their initial levels of education and not ‘free ride’. The experimental confirmation that AA can be economically efficient is reason enough to support such policies, but I think they would be more effective in the real world compared to the experimental world; for example, two contradictory opinions are likely to lead to more economic progress than two homogenous opinions, and this cultural bonus is not modelled in the original experiment.
Yes, the arguments for AA are somewhat muddled...as are the arguments again and every other argument in politics. Politics isn’t a science. But believing in one typically muddled argument isn’t 2+2=5 irrational.
I’m aware of the standard arguments for AA, I’m also aware of arguments for the flatness of the earth. I find both sets of arguments about equally rational. If you have a specific argument that you think is more rational, state it and we can analyze it.
I am sorry, do you consider your link to be evidence? It is a piece of handwaving propaganda from a site called “understandingprejudice.org″ that doesn’t even talk about what’s happening in real life, it just mumbles about ways that AA might be interpreted.
It’s not obviously harmful: the US, with its AA , has higher per capita GDP than Western countries without it.
Really? You would need a really, really high effect of affirmitative action to be stronger than all the other economic effects combined.
In mindkilled enviroments people make arguments that they would never make if they would look at the issue with a statistical perspective. This is one of those arguments.
It’s not a darling of the left, as some self identified liberals don’t actually like it.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not an effect of progressivism.
In mindkilled enviroments people make arguments that they would never make if they would look at the issue with a statistical perspective. This is one of those arguments.
I agree, and this is why I think it’s sketchy (to put it politely) to argue that people are more (or less ) rational now than some point in the past because of greater (or lesser) acceptance of some political viewpoint.
Besides which, even if there were overwhelming proof that support of affirmative action is rational or irrational, I’m pretty confident that most people would choose their belief based on (1) what they are supposed to believe; and (2) what favors their interests.
In short, the vast majority of people are irrational when in “far mode” and always have been.
But you didn’t appeal to the data. You appealed to a single data point.
In any subject that’s not politically charged, people don’t argue that they can see a weak effect in a single data point.
In health science a lot of observational studies that gather way more data don’t replicate. You can’t simple throw out everything we learned in statistics out of the window just because we are talking about a political charged issue.
I am not claiming to see an effect. I am claiming not to see a stro.ng effect. I have stated that I am neutral on AA. I have also stated that that even if AA has a weak negative effect, that proves nothing about the wider points. To do that,I have entertain the hypothesis that AA has a negative effect. Are you still going to call that mindkilled?
The problem is that you shouldn’t expect to see an effect in the case that a meaningful effect exists that isn’t outlandishly high.
I don’t see the weather in Wyoming at the moment. I don’t know whether it’s sunny or cloudy. I wouldn’t make an argument based on my ignorance about the californian weather in most cases.
I would have probably noticed if Yellowstone went of, but apart from that the fact that I don’t know the weather is not meaningful information from which to draw conclusions.
It might be possible that someone did study the issue academically and investigated how affirmative action legislation that passed in different states and countries at different times has an effect on the economy.
that proves nothing about the wider points.
That’s the point. The argument that you made proves nothing at all about the wider points. In political discussions people frequently make arguments that prove nothing at all because they aren’t focusing on the arguments but on the conclusions they want to draw.
I don’t have many stakes in whether or not to have affirmative action legislation. I do have stakes into not making statistical unsound arguments when discussing politics.
I know a single country that used policy X at time Y and the country is not collapsed as a result is not a very useful argument. Of course I’m exaggerating when I say “collapsed” and the US having a worse economy than Western Europe wouldn’t be “collapse”, but it still goes into that direction.
The argument I made was that AA proves nothing about the wider point namely the allegation of growing irrationality. Since that argument is explicitly meta, it is not supposed to address the wider point at object level.
That’s not what you claimed before . .. before you claimed that it was not obviously harmful
It’s not obviously harmful: the US, with its AA , has higher per capita GDP than Western countries without it.
. Now you are claiming that it’s not strongly harmful, which is a much easier claim to defend. Changing your position is perfectly fine, but there is more than one way to go about doing it. If you say “I now see that I overstated my case,” that’s one way. On the other hand, if you just do it without acknowledgment, it strongly suggests to me that you are in battle-mode so to speak, i.e. that you are mind-killed.
Which again shows why it’s a bad idea to assess peoples’ rationality based on their agreement with one or another side of a politically controversial issue. For one thing, most people are too mind-killed to determine which side is the rational side. (I, of course, am an exception :)).
For another, most people choose their beliefs on these issues based on what they are supposed to believe and what favors their interests. Even if they come down on the rational side, they are very likely not doing it for rational reasons. (Again, I, of course, am an exception :)).
Companies are not forced to hire literally unqualified people
However, if they get sued, the burned of proof is on them to show that the people they didn’t hire are in fact unqualified. This is hard to do to the court’s satisfaction, especially if one gets a left wing judge. Furthermore, it will cost you a lot of money and bad publicity even if you win.
Its not obviously irrational, since there are rational arguments on both sides.
And yet neither you nor anyone else in this thread have presented any in favor of AA.
However, if they get sued, the burned of proof is on them to show that the people they didn’t hire are in fact unqualified.
A perhaps more salient point to make here is whether or not “qualified” includes opportunity cost. Take recent firefighting anti-discrimination court cases as an example. The legally approved way to conduct promotion testing is to pass over 90% of the people, and then randomly select from everyone who passed. The legally disapproved way is to test everyone, keep the scores as numbers, sort them, and promote from the top of the list going down.
If you imagine hiring or promotion decisions as binary- “are we going to promote Bob or not”- the first view of qualification makes some sense. Bob doesn’t have anything obviously wrong with him, so sure, we could promote Bob. If you imagine hiring or promotion decisions as multi-optional- “which of these firefighters are we going to promote”- then you’re making n choose 2 pairwise comparisons. Is Bob a better or worse candidate than Tom? Joe? Sue? Under the second view, there isn’t really such a thing as ‘qualified’; there’s the ‘best candidate’ and the ‘not best candidates.’
(This maps pretty clearly onto whether you view the promotion decision from the employee’s point of view- did I get promoted or not- or the employer’s point of view- who should I promote.)
the New York City Fire Department used written examinations with discriminatory effects and little relationship to the job of a firefighter (emphasis added)
The Court found that the City’s use of the two written examinations as an initial pass/fail hurdle in the selection of firefighters was unlawful under Title VII.
Now in addition, the court did say,
the City’s use of applicants’ written examination scores (in combination with their scores on a physical abilities test) to rank-order and process applicants for further consideration for employment violated Title VII.
But if they believed that a candidate with a better score was (ceteris paribus) a better candidate, they would presumably have no problem with this. Remember that people who want you to use AA probably won’t trust your judgment alone. (ETA ceteris)
Which part of my statements specifically are you claiming is wrong?
But if they believed that a candidate with a better score was (ceteris paribus) a better candidate, they would presumably have no problem with this.
I think you have the causation backwards here. Because they have a problem with this, they decide that the candidate with the better score is not a better candidate. If you would like to take a look at the tests yourself, they’re here.
OK, we disagree about motive. Did you notice you were objectively wrong about the reason you gave for your speculation? Or that I got downvoted after pointing this out?
Did you notice you were objectively wrong about the reason you gave for your speculation?
I’m still confused by this part. By ‘legally approved’, I’m referring to the state of things in, say, Chicago, and doing decisions by lottery is an easy way to satisfy both disparate impact and disparate treatment requirements.
By ‘legally disapproved,’ it sounds to me like the part you quoted is obvious that this is disapproved. But let’s take a closer look at the actual decision (copied from a pdf, so there may be errors caused by my reformatting):
Before proceeding to the legal analysis, I offer a brief word about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (June 29, 2009). I reference Ricci not because the Supreme Court’s ruling controls the outcome in this case; to the contrary, I mention Ricci precisely to point out that it does not. In Ricci, the City of New Haven had set aside the results of a promotional examination, and the Supreme Court confronted the narrow issue of whether New Haven could defend a violation of Title VII’s disparate treatment provision by asserting that its challenged employment action was an attempt to comply with Title VII’s disparate impact provision. The Court held that such a defense is only available when “the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute.” Id. at 2664. In contrast, this case presents the entirely separate question of whether Plaintiffs have shown that the City’s use of Exams 7029 and 2043 has actually had a disparate impact upon black and Hispanic applicants for positions as entry-level firefighters. Ricci did not confront that issue.
The Ricci Court concluded that New Haven would not likely have been liable under a disparate impact theory. See id. at 2681. In doing so, the Court relied on the various steps that New Haven took to validate its
civil service examination. Id. at 2678-79. It is noteworthy, however, that in this case New York City has taken significantly fewer steps than New Haven took in validating its examination. The relevant teaching of Ricci, in this regard, is that the process of designing employment examinations is complex, requiring consultation with experts and careful consideration of accepted testing standards. As discussed below, these requirements
are reflected in federal regulations and existing Second Circuit precedent. This legal authority sets forth a simple principle: municipalities must take adequate measures to ensure that their civil service examinations reliably test the relevant knowledge, skills and abilities that will determine which applicants will best perform their specific public duties.
In rendering this decision, I am aware that the use of multiple-choice examinations is typically intended to apply objective standards to employment decisions. Similarly, I recognize
that it is natural to assume that the best performers on an employment test must be the best
people for the job. But, the significance of these principles is undermined when an examination is not fair. As Congress recognized in enacting Title VII, when an employment test is not adequately related to the job for which it tests—and when the test adversely affects minority groups—we may not fall back on the notion that better test takers make better employees. The City asks the court to do just that. Regrettably, though, the City did not take sufficient measures to ensure that better performers on its examinations would actually be
better firefighters. Accordingly, the court grants the Motions for Summary Judgment and finds
that Plaintiffs have established disparate impact liability.
What does this say? In effect, that any test which has different score distributions for different races is guilty until proven innocent. They go on, in sections II and III, to discuss the numbers and conclusions of the calculations.
However, the general cognitive factor exists and differs by race, and will show up on almost any cognitive test. As a result, every test is guilty.* This is the reverse of good sense- the military has done copious research to show that, for every job, g is beneficial (see here for discussion, references to other research, and so on), and the only question is how beneficial.
*They imply that if the Ricci history had been different- that is, the city had promoted the white firefighters on the basis of a rank-ordered written test, and then the minority firefighters had sued on disparate impact grounds, the minority firefighters would have lost because the city had put in sufficient effort to validate the test- but that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should be taken on faith. Indeed, one of the arguments in the decision,
In essence, the City asks the court to reject Plaintiffs’ statistical significance analysis because it improperly assumes “perfect parity” among groups of people (see Def. PF Mem. 1-3, 5-7)
is responded to by:
First of all, the court rejects the premise that comparison to a standard of equality among groups provides an improper foundation for statistical testing under Title VII. In order to determine whether a particular employment practice has had a disparate impact on a minority group, statistical tests “ask what the results would be for the salient variable . . . if there [had been] no discrimination.” Adams v. Ameritech Servs., Inc.
, 231 F.3d 414, 424 (7th Cir. 2000) (emphasis added). To determine what results “would be,” statistical tests
properly assume that racial or ethnic groups will perform equally well absent discrimination.
The only two possibilities the court considers is that either the minorities all got really unlucky on test day (stupendously unlikely, as they correctly calculate) or the city is discriminating against them; the possibility that they might not be as good at doing the job (and thus not as good at taking the test) is assumed to not be the case.
If the US Census Bureau has changed its hiring practices then I may be wrong. But after the initial ruling for Chicago and two rulings for NY, they were still ranking potential new-hires in every area by scores on a basic skills test. The Bureau tailored this test to the set of entry-level Census positions.
Now the last quote in the parent certainly looks disturbing. But that decision emphatically did not give a blanket endorsement of a cut-off followed by a lottery, because it found them liable for exactly that procedure. More specifically, it found them guilty of stupidity or deception for setting a “passing score” of 65 and then failing anyone who made less than 89.
Like every other source, the parent has the court say:
the City did not take sufficient measures to ensure that better performers on its examinations would actually be better firefighters.
It would appear that the court and the people who wrote the law do not share your view of this particular test’s effectiveness. Perhaps you should try to convince them.
If the US Census Bureau has changed its hiring practices then I may be wrong.
I am unfamiliar with how the Census Bureau hires; I was talking about the Chicago fire department, which I am fairly confident does use lotteries in its hiring and promotion decisions.
It would appear that the court and the people who wrote the law do not share your view of this particular test’s effectiveness. Perhaps you should try to convince them.
If they won’t listen to the psychometricians about g, why would I expect them to listen to me?
To clarify, the difference between my view and the court’s view is that I assume that the universally replicated finding of intelligence differences between races will show up on basically any test, because that’s what universally replicated means. Thus, unless the disparate impact is more than would be predicted by the relevant intelligence cutoff, then the burden to show disparate treatment should fall on those claiming discrimination.
The court’s view is that if there is any statistically significant difference between races (which is more strict that the previous 4/5ths rule), the burden of demonstrating differences in racial intelligence and the relevance of intelligence to the job (combined, thankfully, into one ‘validate the test for the particular job you’re hiring for’) falls on the maker of the test. But this falls on the maker of every test, making testing much more costly (and thus much less used) than it has it be, with the resulting efficiency losses. If you would like to use an extensively researched and validated IQ test for your narrow position (perhaps only one person will have this job at your company), that’s not possible- you have to pay for experts to design a test for every position you would like to use a test for and validate that it works for that position, despite copious research demonstrating that a test that targets g specifically will be comparably effective to a specifically-designed test that targets performance on that job.
So you claim these courts (and lawmakers) all know this research on g, and you can’t imagine any better way to present it?
Anyway, you said:
Take recent firefighting anti-discrimination court cases as an example. The legally approved way to conduct promotion testing is to pass over 90% of the people, and then randomly select from everyone who passed. The legally disapproved way is to test everyone, keep the scores as numbers, sort them, and promote from the top of the list going down.
This is false. The first is almost exactly what the Chicago fire department got slapped for doing, and the courts likewise said it would illegal for the NY department. The second is what the US Census Bureau did, and appears perfectly legal due to their test intuitively matching the jobs. This makes no mention of it, instead attacking the Bureau’s use of a binary cut-off.
The court’s explicit motive explains all this quite well. For pointing this out I lost around 50 karma.
So you claim these courts (and lawmakers) all know this research on g, and you can’t imagine any better way to present it?
I don’t know what they know or don’t know, and it’s not clear to me that the presentation rather than the content of the research is the issue.
The first is almost exactly what the Chicago fire department got slapped for doing
All of the discrimination lawsuits I’ve seen for the Chicago fire department, the courts have decided in favor of the city, but I doubt I’ve seen all of them. Which case are you thinking of?
For pointing this out I lost around 50 karma.
I can’t comment as to why others downvoted you; I did not. The primary thing I’ve noticed in discussing this issue with you is that you have several times declared a collection of claims false, which I would replace with putting forth specific contrasting claims. If you want to argue that promoting by lottery, after getting rid of some portion of the applicant pool by using a test, is legally disapproved, then make just that argument, and then we would discuss just that issue instead of having to figure out which issue we’re discussing. If you want to argue that the burden of proof should be on the employer to validate any test which has different score or pass distributions for different groups, then say that clearly, and so on.
In previous research I found this one, brought by white firefighters protesting the affirmative action policies in Chicago, and while I recall a second I’m on a different computer and so can’t easily check my history.
But I don’t think that case makes the point you want it to make. It does not disapprove of hiring by lottery- indeed, the remedy involves selecting which African Americans (but not white or other races!) who scored between 65 and 88 (who are still interested) will get the available jobs by lottery- they just think that the city did not put the passing score bar low enough, and the standard they used to determine what was “low enough” was the disparate impact standard, not any sort of job performance criterion.
[Edit]: I should clarify that, again, the court’s decision is made with the presumption that tests are guilty until proven innocent, and so when the decision says “the test was biased” or “there was no evidence that the test was necessary,” they do not mean that “there is evidence that the test was biased” or “there was evidence that the test was not necessary,” they just mean “there was not sufficient presented evidence that the test was necessary.”
I think I’ve disproven the factual basis you gave for your speculation: the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.
And it’s now 80 karma paperclips. Do you know how ridiculous this looks, how badly Less Wrong is breaking its own rules of conversation?
the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.
The real standard was that ‘disparate impact’ of the black pass rate being less than 80% of the white pass rate was prima facie evidence of discrimination; the more recent cases suggest that any statistically significant difference can be evidence of discrimination. If you ever got the impression that I didn’t think that was how the courts behaved, I apologize for the miscommunication on my end. (I left out the four-fifths part, and just mentioned ‘over 90%’, because I thought it would be more communicative than adding the additional detail.)
I still maintain that if you are seeking to promote, say, 5% of the population, no merit-based test which gives you the top 5% of the population will pass the four-fifths rule in the presence of underlying racial differences in merit. (This would be the ‘rank-by-test-scores’ approach.) Promoting from the entire pool at random would not discriminate by race, but it also wouldn’t discriminate by merit. The way to both have some merit selection, and not run afoul of the four-fifths rule, is to set some cutoff such that the rate at which blacks are above the cutoff is at least 80% of the rate at which whites are above the cutoff, declare everyone above that cutoff as having passed, and then promote randomly from those who passed.
It’s still not clear to me what you think you’ve disproven, or why you think you’ve disproven it. How long this conversation has gone and the propensity for others to downvote your comments suggest to me that it may be wise to call this conversation done here, or move it to PMs if you’re interested in carrying on.
I’ve lost about 150 karma (and the actual loss if it wasn’t for people voting up −1 comments would probably be more like 250). The moderators have done squat, if we even have anything that passes for moderators. (The admins, then.)
For what? Is there a particular explicit rule that’s being broken?
It violates “How should I use my voting powers?” in http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Site_Etiquette_and_Social_Norms but even aside from that, most forums have a rule of “if you’re enough of a dick, we can ban you regardless of whether there’s an explicit rule prohibiting your exact behavior”.
But this falls on the maker of every test, making testing much more costly (and thus much less used) than it has it be
So every job I’ve ever applied for required tests, and all of them looked more like general intelligence tests than specific (the standard brain teasers about buckets of water, geometry questions,etc all for statistical programming jobs). With the exception of one insurance company (who disguised their geometry questions as programming questions), none of these companies tried to pretend these were directly applicable to job performance. To my knowledge, none of these companies have been sued.
If anything, my experience is that testing is overused. A recent hire I wanted (who I’ve worked with before, and who is very competent at exactly what we need) was refused on the basis poor performance on two tests. I’ve consulted for several companies that have expressed that they hired me as a consultant because their HR’s testing procedures have made staffing too inflexible.
I’m fairly confident that you’d have an easier time in court of proving the relevance of g (or proxies for it) to statistical programming than to, say, firefighting.
So every job I’ve ever applied for required tests, and all of them looked more like general intelligence tests than specific (the standard brain teasers about buckets of water, geometry questions,etc all for statistical programming jobs).
So, a handful of brain teasers issued and interpreted by non-experts is surely inferior to an IQ test. So why don’t we have nationally recognized agencies that administer IQ tests, that they then report to potential employers at your request, like the SAT and colleges?
(And it is unfortunate about that hire- organizations should make the most of local knowledge like that, but often fail to. Hiring people as consultants might be more efficient, though, especially if you know the person has the skills for the job you need done now but might not have the skills for the next job you need.)
Which part of my statements specifically are you claiming is wrong?
First,
Take recent firefighting anti-discrimination court cases as an example. The legally approved way to conduct promotion testing is to pass over 90% of the people, and then randomly select from everyone who passed.
I don’t know what you’re talking about here, but I just quoted such a decision explicitly calling it illegal to use a particular test pass/fail. Because the court explicitly didn’t trust the test.
It looks to me like you assume everyone does trust the test to do something other than hurt minorities. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to speculate about motives. In general, if someone wants you to improve minority representation, you can assume they don’t trust your personal judgment—and if you’re using tests, they don’t trust you to judge the value of the tests. Should they? Should we believe these written tests produce better firefighters, based on the available evidence?
In general, if someone wants you to improve minority representation, you can assume they don’t trust your personal judgment
I don’t think this is true. The doctrine of disparate impact says that your personal judgement is irrelevant—you MUST achieve something resembling proportionate representation regardless of anything (other than a demonstratable business need). It tests for outcomes, not intentions.
I mean they don’t trust your personal judgment of what constitutes “demonstrable business need”. Either that or they suspect you have conscious motives beyond business need.
You are assuming there are no significant race- or sex-based differences.
For example, let’s say I run a business and I like to hire smart people. Basically, I prefer high-IQ people to low-IQ people. Given that the average black IQ is about one standard deviation below the average white IQ which is lower than average East Asian IQ, I would end up with employing relatively more Asian and white people and relatively less black people.
This is very straightforward case of disparate impact. What is it about my personal judgement that “they” should not trust?
It might help to taboo what we mean by “business need”. Does it mean, “probably won’t go out of business next year if I don’t do this”, in that case it is likely that I don’t have a “business need” not to hire completely unqualified people as long as the rest can fill up the slack.
On the other hand, if “business need” means “this will make my business run better”, then as Lumifer pointed out, it just happens that business runs better with smart people than with stupid people.
Are you being serious? Did you notice how you went from “business need” to “like to hire smart people” to “prefer high-IQ”?
Yes, I am. I do not have a legally demonstratable business need (that’s why I said it’s a straightforward case). It just happens that business runs better with smart people than with stupid people. Therefore I prefer to hire smart people and in this context “high-IQ” is a synonym of “smart”.
The outcome is clearly illegal under the disparate impact doctrine.
I am not sure what your position is here. That my desire to hire smart people is mistaken? That my ability to identify smart people is not be trusted?
I don’t have a clue who ‘you’ are. For the firefighting department we started with, I challenge both inferences. And I’m baffled at having to spell this out.
In this subthread “I” means a fictional business manager in a hypothetical situation. Specifically, that manager wants to hire smart people and runs head-first into a disparate impact case.
And I’m baffled at having to spell this out.
Perhaps you should consider that other people think differently than you and often start from different assumptions, too.
Are “you” using race as a proxy for IQ, using actual IQ, or using evidence of domain relevant knowledge?
I notice that real world employers tend to emphasise the last. Rightly, because it avoids the Spolskyan problem of “smart, but doesn’t get things done”
Are “you” using race as a proxy for IQ, using actual IQ, or using evidence of domain relevant knowledge?
(a) No; (b) Mostly; (c) Somewhat.
Domain knowledge functions as a hard cutoff at the lower end (if you need an accountant, you need someone who can do accounting) but the higher it is, the less important it becomes unless you’re filling a position at the bleeding edge of a particular field.
Domain knowledge is also not the same thing as work habits, effectiveness, etc.
Work habits, etc, can be judged by someone’s ability to get things done,
These haven’t been as extensively studied, but anecdotal evidence suggests these are also correlated with race. Furthermore, since judging these things is obviously going to be more subjective than looking at the results of a test, an employer relying on these is going to be even more open to accusations of racism.
Basically, each job has an appropriate IQ range. It’s better to pick people from the higher end of that range than from the lower end.
Work habits, etc, can be judged by someone’s ability to get things done, which can be judged from their resume as per standard recruitment procedures.
No, I don’t think you can effectively evaluate things like work habits on the basis of a “normal” resume. There is a reason people are hired after interviews and, sometimes, test periods and not just on the basis of their resumes.
You seem to think IQ is a better indicator. Why?
IQ is not a better indicator of work habits. However it is a good indicator of the contribution that a person can make to your organization. To make obvious observations, people with higher IQ work faster, make fewer mistakes, need less things explained to them, can handle the unexpected better, etc. etc.
Real worldemployers are careful not to hire unqualified people, because they get .bored, leave etc. I don’t see why thatwouldnt stretch to IQ.
So an antisocial geek with a high IQ would be great in customer services? Well, other wouldn’t. Real world employers have a more multidimensional view.
For example, currently companies must either hire unqualified people or risk being accused to racism and/or sexism since they’re workplace ratios don’t match those of the general population.
Such as?
I can certainly list negative consequences of the false belief being widespread (and “official”). For example, currently companies must either hire unqualified people or risk being accused to racism and/or sexism since they’re workplace ratios don’t match those of the general population. People attempting to create alternate accreditation systems regularly get sued on disparate impact grounds.
Companies are not forced to hire literally unqualified people: Myth 10
Btw, AA is a terrible example of creeping progressivism/ir rationality.
Its not obviously irrational, since there are rational arguments on both sides.
It’s not a darling of the left, as some self identified liberals don’t actually like it.
It’s not universal feature of modern liberal democracies -it is mostly an issue in the US.
It’s not obviously harmful: the US, with its AA , has higher per capita GDP than Western countries without it.
EDIT And some companies adopt similar policies voluntarily.
You may have heard of a country called India, which had a racism problem that seems worse than the American one, and which attempted to counteract it with affirmative action, beginning over a century ago. The opponents of AA have had their predictions validated, and the proponents of AA have mostly had their predictions disconfirmed, by the Indian experience.
Can you elaborate? I can speculate, but I don’t actually know much about India with regards to this problem.
Sure. Here’s an article from the Economist, but Thomas Sowell also wrote a book about the issue called Affirmative Action Around the World. I should also note that the national reservation system is not quite a century old yet, but reservation systems of some sort have existed for longer.
I should note that I am a fan of the policy that ‘affirmative action’ originally described- that is, taking action to affirm the government’s commitment to meritocracy over bias, in order to counteract the self-fulfilling prophecy of people not applying because they don’t expect to be hired or promoted on racial grounds- and am a strong opponent of reservation systems that ‘affirmative action’ is now used to describe. Officially, reservation systems are illegal in the US- but it’s hard to see how one should interpret ‘disparate impact’ any other way. (‘Disparate treatment’ is the American word for anti-meritocratic bias, and so American systems have to be a tortured mess that is not too meritocratic (or it’s racist) or too anti-meritocratic (or it’s racist).)
A handful of claims:
AA is a temporary fix / AA is a permanent fixture of society:
(On this subject, reading Sotomayor’s questioning during affirmative action cases that come before the Supreme Court is an… interesting experience.)
AA will not lead to loss of quality / AA will increase corruption and decrease meritocracy:
AA will decrease resentment between groups / AA will increase resentment between groups:
(One weird quirk of psychology, here: suppose there are 10 slots, and 100 applicants, 10% of which are Dalit, so one of the slots is reserved for a Dalit. If the top Dalit scores 20th best on the test, numbers 10 through 19 all feel as though they have been deprived by the Dalit taking the 10th slot, even though number 10 is the only person actually deprived.)
AA will lead to homogeneity and acceptance / AA will lead to heteogeneity and perpetuate divisions.
The benefits will go to the poorest and most deserving / The benefits will go to the richest and least deserving.
The Economist article doesn’t discuss this directly, but others (that I don’t have time to find now) do. There’s a ‘creamy layer’ provision to try to prevent the richest of the Other Backwards Castes from benefiting (to convert to an American example, if your parents are millionaires, you probably don’t need AA consideration even if you’re black) but this does not apply to the Scheduled Castes (Dalits). The hypothetical highest scoring Dalit mentioned earlier almost certainly comes from a rich Dalit family, and by looking at the subdivision within caste of the various beneficiaries of reservations it’s been shown that the majority come from the SCs that were already privileged within the SCs.
Thankyou for that information. Note that I am arguing against the proposition. “The world is getting more irrational, which we can tell from the rise of affirmative action, which is clearly irrational.”.
I don’t have any strong commitment to AA. I only need to argue that it is not clearly irrational. It may nonetheless be mistaken in subtle way that takes decades of empirical evidence to detect.
What’s irrational is the belief (or rather alief) that anyone arguing that the cause of the observed differences in intelligence by race isn’t caused by white racism (or for that matter anyone pointing out said difference who doesn’t immediately attribute it to white racism) is an EVIL RACIST. AA is just one consequence of this irrationality.
It’s not obvious 2+2=5 irrationality, since there are arguments on both sides. You are effectively calling people irrational for disagreeing with you.
Nothing, outside mathematics is obvious 2+2=5 irrational. Near as I can tell, AA appears to be pretty close to flat-earther irrational. You keep saying there are arguments on both sides, but seem rather short on arguments for yours.
South Africa, 1994. For the previous several decades, the government policy has been something called Apartheid; which can be briefly summarised as, the white people get all the nice stuff, the coloured people get okay stuff, and black people get pretty much the stuff no-one else wants, including (for by far the majority) severely substandard education specifically designed to prevent them from having the mental tools to escape their economic dead-end. The system is maintained partially by the fact that ‘all the nice stuff’ includes the right to vote.
Recently, the government has caved in and allowed everyone to vote. Predictably, they are voted out and a new government is voted in, determined to undo the damage of Apartheid. They face, of course, the problem that most of the white people in the workforce are well-educated and fairly well-off; while most of the black people are not doing so well on either front. (Oh, sure, there’s plenty of educated black people—generally ones who could afford to be educated overseas—but they’re a tiny proportion in a vast sea of people). By and large, the white minority is in a position to continue to hold an economic superiority over the black majority for generations, unless something is done to redress the balance.
In such circumstances, would you think that a temporary bout of Affirmative Action would be a rational response by the new government?
Ignoring for the moment the question of genetic differences in intelligence, the fundamental problem here is that the blacks are less educated (and less a lot of other things related to education) than whites. These problems are not getting resolved quickly and until they are it makes sense for the white minority to be in an economically superior position. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with an advanced economic system manged by people who aren’t qualified to manage it. Look at what happened to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to see where that leads.
Note, however, if your only goal is to redress the power balance between whites and blacks, Zimbabwe did in fact solve that problem, i.e., blacks are now being oppressed by fellow blacks rather than whites. Also the economy has been destroyed, so the conditions for everyone involved are much worse.
I’m not an expert on Zimbabwean history by any means, but this doesn’t quite seem to add up. According to World Bank data, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has lagged sub-Saharan Africa (never mind the rest of the world) in per-capita GDP (measured in constant 2000 dollars) since at least 1960. As you can see from the graph, there’s no dramatic discontinuity coinciding with the end of the Bush War; there is a decline over the war years themselves, but I’d attribute that more to the damage done by a markedly nasty civil conflict. It later stops tracking Africa’s broader economic performance around 2001, but that timeframe seems to coincide with Robert Mugabe’s land redistribution programs and involvement in the Congo War: a specific case of mismanagement by a notorious dictator, twenty years after the changes you’re alluding to.
I’d consider this more conclusive if I’d been able to find data going back further. Still, if Rhodesia had qualified as an advanced economy, I’d have expected better than $500 GDP/capita in 1960 -- and if it was the removal of Zimbabwe’s white minority’s political influence that had screwed everything up, I’d have expected a decline starting around 1978, not the minor increase and quick plateau that we observe.
That is a large part of the fundamental problem, yes. A lot of blacks were also:
Unable to pay for a proper education
Without a house of their own
Without ready access to electricity or proper sanitation
And the education problem is made worse by the fact that there were not enough properly qualified teachers in the country to deliver that education to everyone.
And you are right, these problems are not going to get resolved quickly. (It’s twenty years later now, and a lot of the problems still haven’t been resolved). It’s probably going to take two, maybe three generations minimum to get the country back on an even keel again.
But, in short, Apartheid was an incredibly unbalanced system. The inequalities caused and perpetuated during the Apartheid years were massive, dwarfing any possible genetic differences in intelligence. And, in the face of those inequalities, it seems to me that a temporary program of affirmative action (defined as, if there are muliple qualified applicants for a position, bias the selection process in the direction of the black applicants if present) is a reasonable measure to try to counteract those inequalities without sabotaging the country’s economy.
Compare apartheid with feudalism. And notice that a lot of countries transitioned away from the latter didn’t require AA in favor of commoners.
The transition away from feudalism took literally hundreds of years. On the same time scales it took countries to transition out of feudalism, I’d assume any difference that affirmative action would have on South Africa would be absolutely dwarfed by hundreds of years of technological progress.
In any particular country, no, not really. The important switches (e.g. the ability of commoners to obtain education beyond primary school) happen much more quickly. However we have a current example: China. Over the last thirty years or so there has been a massive influx of former peasants (without “proper education”) out of the countryside into the industrial workforce and into the cities. Funny how no one suggests there should be an affirmative action program for them.
EHeller’s got the main point, here; we kindof want the transition to go a little faster than ‘centuries’. If we’re careful, we can hopefully make the transition happen in merely a two or three generations, instead.
(Then, of course, Affirmative Action will need to be stopped—which is probably going to be quite a political battle, involving lots of shouting an arguments in Parliament. And hopefully no more than that.)
Or we can screw up and cause the country to collapse into chaos, i.e., what’s happening now in Zimbabwe.
Yes, that’s also a possibility. There’s the very visible example of Zimbabwe to show what not to do, of course; I’m not saying that there won’t be a mess-up, but if there is a mess-up I’m pretty sure it’ll at least be a different mess-up.
I’m not the only person on the planet with Google. If you type in “arguments for affirmative action” , you’ll find them.
Google doesn’t know which of those arguments make any sense at all and which are complete bollocks, so locating the former specifically isn’t that trivial.
The topic of the discussion seems to have shifted from “there are no arguments for AA” to “there are no good arguments for AA”
In general speech, “there are no arguments for X” and “there are no good arguments for X” are synonymous.
I don’t think so, because “there is an argument for ,X, but it is not good” makes sense. There is however a tendency to slide down a slope from “no argument” to “no good argument” to “no argument I like”.
See implicature and “When Truth Isn’t Enough”. If there are arguments for X but they are all bad, “there are arguments for X” is technically true, but misleading, and not terribly relevant to whether X is obviously wrong.
As for the specific case of AA, I agree it’s neither as obviously right as banning murder nor as obviously wrong as banning glasses (to steal examples from “Searching For One-Sided Tradeoffs” on Yvain’s blog), otherwise it would either be uncontroversially implemented everywhere or something no-one ever seriously proposed (other than the kind of mentally ill dictators who ban banknotes in denominations not a multiple of 9), but to treat this as something very informative about AA is the fallacy of gray.
(There are good arguments for banning glasses: for example, kids might try to use them to focus sunlight to burn ants and accidentally burn their own skin instead. It’s just that arguments against banning glasses are much stronger.)
If the arguments for X are bad, you should be able to say why, and not just shift the burden:-
“Hedgehogs are evil alien robots sent to kill us.”
“Huh?”
“Prove to me that they are gentle and Noble creatures, then!”
You’re the one who’s shifting the burned by insisting that AA isn’t obviously wrong while refusing to provide any arguments for it. Whereas arguments against AA have been provided by me and others in this thread.
Furthermore, I’d like to remind you that this thread started because I cited opposition to AA as an example of a practical application of a certain fact about reality (namely racial differences in intelligence), which you were attempting to argue had no practical applications and thus suppressing it wasn’t irrational. (At least that’s my attempt to steel-man your position.)
There are arguments for AA which are know to everybody who knows even a little about the subject.
Its not rational for me to study AA in detail because it is not an issue in my life. One of my 5 or 6 arguments against using AA as a proxy for irrationality is that it is a very localised issue.
A standard argument for AA is that it is form of recompense. Standard arguments against it are that it makes the economy inefficient, or interferes in freedom. These arguments tacitly make value judgements...that freedom is more (or less) valuable than justice. However, people arent irrational just because they make different value judgements to you. Unless you can argue that there is one rational set of values.
Who was arguing for using it as a proxy for irrationality?
This isn’t really a viable argument because:
1) This argument relies on collective justice, something its supporters otherwise oppose.
2) It’s not clear what is supposedly being recompensed. If the answer is slavery and/or past discriminatory policies why does it apply to recent immigrants from Africa? Why isn’t it being applied to other groups, e.g., Irish, Jews, Asians that were subject to such policies in the past. (In fact in the case of the latter two AA is functionally a continuation of said policies).
3) Pursuing highly economically inefficient policies seems a weird way to provide recompense.
This seems an unfair response to me—TheAncientGeek offers a standard argument pro-AA while admitting they haven’t studied the issue in detail. You attack the response on grounds that an AA supporter could rebut without ever contradicting themselves (i.e. “It isn’t collective justice, it compensates for individual inequality of opportunity (unless, say, you choose to define a progressive income tax as ‘collective justice’ in which case I do support collective justice)”, “It applies to certain minorities and not others because of the size of the disopportunity facing them (discriminatory social structures don’t distinguish between recent immigrants and descendants of slaves, but they do appear to discriminate between black African and white Irish)” and “It isn’t economically inefficient, and might even be economically efficient”).
The next paragraph contains an argument for AA which I support which I think proves there is at least one rational argument for AA. If it is important to you, I can also defend my position to prove to you it is not obviously wrong (although I hope the argument alone will be enough). If there is a rational argument in favour of AA, then there must be at least one utility function that makes supporting AA rational (in the same way that a utility function which really REALLY values ants might rationally choose to try to ban glasses so children can’t use them to burn ants). I don’t agree with TheAncientGeek’s starting premise that we should therefore suppress research into race, but I think it is important you don’t base your conclusion on a faulty premise (“AA is obviously wrong”).
This 2005 paper published in The Journal of Economic Education gives the result of an experiment where participants were randomly assigned a colour (‘green’ or ‘purple’) and given the following information (I’m paraphrasing badly to ensure I remain brief, please consult the paper for the actual protocol): “You are allowed to get education, which costs £1. You then take a (simulated) test where your score is randomly picked from 1 to 100, but if you bought education the score will have a small bias towards the higher end. ‘Employers’ (other participants) will then choose whether to ‘employ’ you. They only know your colour and your test score. If they employ you, you get £5. If they don’t, you get £1. If an employer picks an individual with education, the employer gets £10, otherwise they get nothing.” I presume the experiment was then iterated an unknown number of times to prevent gaming, but I can’t find that in the paper. Clearly, the socially optimal outcome is that everybody gets education and the employers employ everybody. However, individuals can earn the full £10 rather than a net £9 by gambling on the employers being over-generous and picking them even though they didn’t get education.
By chance, the ‘purples’ happened to be under-educated in the first round, which meant some purples who got an education decided not to waste the money next round. This therefore compounded the effect, to the point where new purples realised there was no point in investing in education, so even some free-riding greens couldn’t prevent employers betting on greens (even if the green score was lower than the purple score). If the society in the experiment were allowed to implement AA they would; it would be hugely more economically efficient to remove the pro-green bias and both encourage purples back into education and force greens to keep up their initial levels of education and not ‘free ride’. The experimental confirmation that AA can be economically efficient is reason enough to support such policies, but I think they would be more effective in the real world compared to the experimental world; for example, two contradictory opinions are likely to lead to more economic progress than two homogenous opinions, and this cultural bonus is not modelled in the original experiment.
I will point out again that there is no concrete evidence that AA is economically inefficient lot alone highly so.
Yes, the arguments for AA are somewhat muddled...as are the arguments again and every other argument in politics. Politics isn’t a science. But believing in one typically muddled argument isn’t 2+2=5 irrational.
The thug abusing the karma system, for one. Unless that person knows he’s trying to silence people for reasons unrelated to rationality.
I’m aware of the standard arguments for AA, I’m also aware of arguments for the flatness of the earth. I find both sets of arguments about equally rational. If you have a specific argument that you think is more rational, state it and we can analyze it.
I am sorry, do you consider your link to be evidence? It is a piece of handwaving propaganda from a site called “understandingprejudice.org″ that doesn’t even talk about what’s happening in real life, it just mumbles about ways that AA might be interpreted.
Really? You would need a really, really high effect of affirmitative action to be stronger than all the other economic effects combined.
In mindkilled enviroments people make arguments that they would never make if they would look at the issue with a statistical perspective. This is one of those arguments.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not an effect of progressivism.
I agree, and this is why I think it’s sketchy (to put it politely) to argue that people are more (or less ) rational now than some point in the past because of greater (or lesser) acceptance of some political viewpoint.
Besides which, even if there were overwhelming proof that support of affirmative action is rational or irrational, I’m pretty confident that most people would choose their belief based on (1) what they are supposed to believe; and (2) what favors their interests.
In short, the vast majority of people are irrational when in “far mode” and always have been.
Let’s say AA is an effect of progessivism,in those countries that have it. What follows from that about any rising tide of irrationalaity?
If US AA had weak negative effect, as you claim, that would match the data.
If US AA had a weak positive effect, that would match the data.
If US AA had no effect,that would match the data.
But you didn’t appeal to the data. You appealed to a single data point.
In any subject that’s not politically charged, people don’t argue that they can see a weak effect in a single data point.
In health science a lot of observational studies that gather way more data don’t replicate. You can’t simple throw out everything we learned in statistics out of the window just because we are talking about a political charged issue.
I am not claiming to see an effect. I am claiming not to see a stro.ng effect. I have stated that I am neutral on AA. I have also stated that that even if AA has a weak negative effect, that proves nothing about the wider points. To do that,I have entertain the hypothesis that AA has a negative effect. Are you still going to call that mindkilled?
The problem is that you shouldn’t expect to see an effect in the case that a meaningful effect exists that isn’t outlandishly high.
I don’t see the weather in Wyoming at the moment. I don’t know whether it’s sunny or cloudy. I wouldn’t make an argument based on my ignorance about the californian weather in most cases.
I would have probably noticed if Yellowstone went of, but apart from that the fact that I don’t know the weather is not meaningful information from which to draw conclusions.
It might be possible that someone did study the issue academically and investigated how affirmative action legislation that passed in different states and countries at different times has an effect on the economy.
That’s the point. The argument that you made proves nothing at all about the wider points. In political discussions people frequently make arguments that prove nothing at all because they aren’t focusing on the arguments but on the conclusions they want to draw.
I don’t have many stakes in whether or not to have affirmative action legislation. I do have stakes into not making statistical unsound arguments when discussing politics.
I know a single country that used policy X at time Y and the country is not collapsed as a result is not a very useful argument. Of course I’m exaggerating when I say “collapsed” and the US having a worse economy than Western Europe wouldn’t be “collapse”, but it still goes into that direction.
The argument I made was that AA proves nothing about the wider point namely the allegation of growing irrationality. Since that argument is explicitly meta, it is not supposed to address the wider point at object level.
That’s not what you claimed before . .. before you claimed that it was not obviously harmful
. Now you are claiming that it’s not strongly harmful, which is a much easier claim to defend. Changing your position is perfectly fine, but there is more than one way to go about doing it. If you say “I now see that I overstated my case,” that’s one way. On the other hand, if you just do it without acknowledgment, it strongly suggests to me that you are in battle-mode so to speak, i.e. that you are mind-killed.
Which again shows why it’s a bad idea to assess peoples’ rationality based on their agreement with one or another side of a politically controversial issue. For one thing, most people are too mind-killed to determine which side is the rational side. (I, of course, am an exception :)).
For another, most people choose their beliefs on these issues based on what they are supposed to believe and what favors their interests. Even if they come down on the rational side, they are very likely not doing it for rational reasons. (Again, I, of course, am an exception :)).
Also: companies in countries without AA have been known to adopt ethnic monitoring policies voluntarily.
Really, if AA is the most broken thing about progressivism, it’s not all that broken.
However, if they get sued, the burned of proof is on them to show that the people they didn’t hire are in fact unqualified. This is hard to do to the court’s satisfaction, especially if one gets a left wing judge. Furthermore, it will cost you a lot of money and bad publicity even if you win.
And yet neither you nor anyone else in this thread have presented any in favor of AA.
A perhaps more salient point to make here is whether or not “qualified” includes opportunity cost. Take recent firefighting anti-discrimination court cases as an example. The legally approved way to conduct promotion testing is to pass over 90% of the people, and then randomly select from everyone who passed. The legally disapproved way is to test everyone, keep the scores as numbers, sort them, and promote from the top of the list going down.
If you imagine hiring or promotion decisions as binary- “are we going to promote Bob or not”- the first view of qualification makes some sense. Bob doesn’t have anything obviously wrong with him, so sure, we could promote Bob. If you imagine hiring or promotion decisions as multi-optional- “which of these firefighters are we going to promote”- then you’re making n choose 2 pairwise comparisons. Is Bob a better or worse candidate than Tom? Joe? Sue? Under the second view, there isn’t really such a thing as ‘qualified’; there’s the ‘best candidate’ and the ‘not best candidates.’
(This maps pretty clearly onto whether you view the promotion decision from the employee’s point of view- did I get promoted or not- or the employer’s point of view- who should I promote.)
No, quite wrong:
Now in addition, the court did say,
But if they believed that a candidate with a better score was (ceteris paribus) a better candidate, they would presumably have no problem with this. Remember that people who want you to use AA probably won’t trust your judgment alone. (ETA ceteris)
Which part of my statements specifically are you claiming is wrong?
I think you have the causation backwards here. Because they have a problem with this, they decide that the candidate with the better score is not a better candidate. If you would like to take a look at the tests yourself, they’re here.
OK, we disagree about motive. Did you notice you were objectively wrong about the reason you gave for your speculation? Or that I got downvoted after pointing this out?
I’m still confused by this part. By ‘legally approved’, I’m referring to the state of things in, say, Chicago, and doing decisions by lottery is an easy way to satisfy both disparate impact and disparate treatment requirements.
By ‘legally disapproved,’ it sounds to me like the part you quoted is obvious that this is disapproved. But let’s take a closer look at the actual decision (copied from a pdf, so there may be errors caused by my reformatting):
What does this say? In effect, that any test which has different score distributions for different races is guilty until proven innocent. They go on, in sections II and III, to discuss the numbers and conclusions of the calculations.
However, the general cognitive factor exists and differs by race, and will show up on almost any cognitive test. As a result, every test is guilty.* This is the reverse of good sense- the military has done copious research to show that, for every job, g is beneficial (see here for discussion, references to other research, and so on), and the only question is how beneficial.
*They imply that if the Ricci history had been different- that is, the city had promoted the white firefighters on the basis of a rank-ordered written test, and then the minority firefighters had sued on disparate impact grounds, the minority firefighters would have lost because the city had put in sufficient effort to validate the test- but that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should be taken on faith. Indeed, one of the arguments in the decision,
is responded to by:
The only two possibilities the court considers is that either the minorities all got really unlucky on test day (stupendously unlikely, as they correctly calculate) or the city is discriminating against them; the possibility that they might not be as good at doing the job (and thus not as good at taking the test) is assumed to not be the case.
If the US Census Bureau has changed its hiring practices then I may be wrong. But after the initial ruling for Chicago and two rulings for NY, they were still ranking potential new-hires in every area by scores on a basic skills test. The Bureau tailored this test to the set of entry-level Census positions.
Now the last quote in the parent certainly looks disturbing. But that decision emphatically did not give a blanket endorsement of a cut-off followed by a lottery, because it found them liable for exactly that procedure. More specifically, it found them guilty of stupidity or deception for setting a “passing score” of 65 and then failing anyone who made less than 89.
Like every other source, the parent has the court say:
It would appear that the court and the people who wrote the law do not share your view of this particular test’s effectiveness. Perhaps you should try to convince them.
I am unfamiliar with how the Census Bureau hires; I was talking about the Chicago fire department, which I am fairly confident does use lotteries in its hiring and promotion decisions.
If they won’t listen to the psychometricians about g, why would I expect them to listen to me?
To clarify, the difference between my view and the court’s view is that I assume that the universally replicated finding of intelligence differences between races will show up on basically any test, because that’s what universally replicated means. Thus, unless the disparate impact is more than would be predicted by the relevant intelligence cutoff, then the burden to show disparate treatment should fall on those claiming discrimination.
The court’s view is that if there is any statistically significant difference between races (which is more strict that the previous 4/5ths rule), the burden of demonstrating differences in racial intelligence and the relevance of intelligence to the job (combined, thankfully, into one ‘validate the test for the particular job you’re hiring for’) falls on the maker of the test. But this falls on the maker of every test, making testing much more costly (and thus much less used) than it has it be, with the resulting efficiency losses. If you would like to use an extensively researched and validated IQ test for your narrow position (perhaps only one person will have this job at your company), that’s not possible- you have to pay for experts to design a test for every position you would like to use a test for and validate that it works for that position, despite copious research demonstrating that a test that targets g specifically will be comparably effective to a specifically-designed test that targets performance on that job.
So you claim these courts (and lawmakers) all know this research on g, and you can’t imagine any better way to present it?
Anyway, you said:
This is false. The first is almost exactly what the Chicago fire department got slapped for doing, and the courts likewise said it would illegal for the NY department. The second is what the US Census Bureau did, and appears perfectly legal due to their test intuitively matching the jobs. This makes no mention of it, instead attacking the Bureau’s use of a binary cut-off.
The court’s explicit motive explains all this quite well. For pointing this out I lost around 50 karma.
I don’t know what they know or don’t know, and it’s not clear to me that the presentation rather than the content of the research is the issue.
All of the discrimination lawsuits I’ve seen for the Chicago fire department, the courts have decided in favor of the city, but I doubt I’ve seen all of them. Which case are you thinking of?
I can’t comment as to why others downvoted you; I did not. The primary thing I’ve noticed in discussing this issue with you is that you have several times declared a collection of claims false, which I would replace with putting forth specific contrasting claims. If you want to argue that promoting by lottery, after getting rid of some portion of the applicant pool by using a test, is legally disapproved, then make just that argument, and then we would discuss just that issue instead of having to figure out which issue we’re discussing. If you want to argue that the burden of proof should be on the employer to validate any test which has different score or pass distributions for different groups, then say that clearly, and so on.
What?
In previous research I found this one, brought by white firefighters protesting the affirmative action policies in Chicago, and while I recall a second I’m on a different computer and so can’t easily check my history.
But I don’t think that case makes the point you want it to make. It does not disapprove of hiring by lottery- indeed, the remedy involves selecting which African Americans (but not white or other races!) who scored between 65 and 88 (who are still interested) will get the available jobs by lottery- they just think that the city did not put the passing score bar low enough, and the standard they used to determine what was “low enough” was the disparate impact standard, not any sort of job performance criterion.
[Edit]: I should clarify that, again, the court’s decision is made with the presumption that tests are guilty until proven innocent, and so when the decision says “the test was biased” or “there was no evidence that the test was necessary,” they do not mean that “there is evidence that the test was biased” or “there was evidence that the test was not necessary,” they just mean “there was not sufficient presented evidence that the test was necessary.”
I think I’ve disproven the factual basis you gave for your speculation: the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.
And it’s now 80 karma paperclips. Do you know how ridiculous this looks, how badly Less Wrong is breaking its own rules of conversation?
The real standard was that ‘disparate impact’ of the black pass rate being less than 80% of the white pass rate was prima facie evidence of discrimination; the more recent cases suggest that any statistically significant difference can be evidence of discrimination. If you ever got the impression that I didn’t think that was how the courts behaved, I apologize for the miscommunication on my end. (I left out the four-fifths part, and just mentioned ‘over 90%’, because I thought it would be more communicative than adding the additional detail.)
I still maintain that if you are seeking to promote, say, 5% of the population, no merit-based test which gives you the top 5% of the population will pass the four-fifths rule in the presence of underlying racial differences in merit. (This would be the ‘rank-by-test-scores’ approach.) Promoting from the entire pool at random would not discriminate by race, but it also wouldn’t discriminate by merit. The way to both have some merit selection, and not run afoul of the four-fifths rule, is to set some cutoff such that the rate at which blacks are above the cutoff is at least 80% of the rate at which whites are above the cutoff, declare everyone above that cutoff as having passed, and then promote randomly from those who passed.
It’s still not clear to me what you think you’ve disproven, or why you think you’ve disproven it. How long this conversation has gone and the propensity for others to downvote your comments suggest to me that it may be wise to call this conversation done here, or move it to PMs if you’re interested in carrying on.
I’ve lost about 150 karma (and the actual loss if it wasn’t for people voting up −1 comments would probably be more like 250). The moderators have done squat, if we even have anything that passes for moderators. (The admins, then.)
The moldbuggians seem to prefer downvoting to argument. Maybe it’s cooler.
What exactly do you think the moderators should do?
They could ban the stalker.
Alternately, they could release the stalker’s name.
And of course they could always use the incident as evidence that the code needs support for other measures.
For what? Is there a particular explicit rule that’s being broken?
Yes, I know how well-kept gardens die. But that’s not the only way for a garden to die.
It violates “How should I use my voting powers?” in http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Site_Etiquette_and_Social_Norms but even aside from that, most forums have a rule of “if you’re enough of a dick, we can ban you regardless of whether there’s an explicit rule prohibiting your exact behavior”.
So every job I’ve ever applied for required tests, and all of them looked more like general intelligence tests than specific (the standard brain teasers about buckets of water, geometry questions,etc all for statistical programming jobs). With the exception of one insurance company (who disguised their geometry questions as programming questions), none of these companies tried to pretend these were directly applicable to job performance. To my knowledge, none of these companies have been sued.
If anything, my experience is that testing is overused. A recent hire I wanted (who I’ve worked with before, and who is very competent at exactly what we need) was refused on the basis poor performance on two tests. I’ve consulted for several companies that have expressed that they hired me as a consultant because their HR’s testing procedures have made staffing too inflexible.
I’m fairly confident that you’d have an easier time in court of proving the relevance of g (or proxies for it) to statistical programming than to, say, firefighting.
So, a handful of brain teasers issued and interpreted by non-experts is surely inferior to an IQ test. So why don’t we have nationally recognized agencies that administer IQ tests, that they then report to potential employers at your request, like the SAT and colleges?
(And it is unfortunate about that hire- organizations should make the most of local knowledge like that, but often fail to. Hiring people as consultants might be more efficient, though, especially if you know the person has the skills for the job you need done now but might not have the skills for the next job you need.)
First,
I don’t know what you’re talking about here, but I just quoted such a decision explicitly calling it illegal to use a particular test pass/fail. Because the court explicitly didn’t trust the test.
It looks to me like you assume everyone does trust the test to do something other than hurt minorities. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to speculate about motives. In general, if someone wants you to improve minority representation, you can assume they don’t trust your personal judgment—and if you’re using tests, they don’t trust you to judge the value of the tests. Should they? Should we believe these written tests produce better firefighters, based on the available evidence?
I don’t think this is true. The doctrine of disparate impact says that your personal judgement is irrelevant—you MUST achieve something resembling proportionate representation regardless of anything (other than a demonstratable business need). It tests for outcomes, not intentions.
I mean they don’t trust your personal judgment of what constitutes “demonstrable business need”. Either that or they suspect you have conscious motives beyond business need.
You are assuming there are no significant race- or sex-based differences.
For example, let’s say I run a business and I like to hire smart people. Basically, I prefer high-IQ people to low-IQ people. Given that the average black IQ is about one standard deviation below the average white IQ which is lower than average East Asian IQ, I would end up with employing relatively more Asian and white people and relatively less black people.
This is very straightforward case of disparate impact. What is it about my personal judgement that “they” should not trust?
Are you being serious? Did you notice how you went from “business need” to “like to hire smart people” to “prefer high-IQ”?
It might help to taboo what we mean by “business need”. Does it mean, “probably won’t go out of business next year if I don’t do this”, in that case it is likely that I don’t have a “business need” not to hire completely unqualified people as long as the rest can fill up the slack.
On the other hand, if “business need” means “this will make my business run better”, then as Lumifer pointed out, it just happens that business runs better with smart people than with stupid people.
Yes, I am. I do not have a legally demonstratable business need (that’s why I said it’s a straightforward case). It just happens that business runs better with smart people than with stupid people. Therefore I prefer to hire smart people and in this context “high-IQ” is a synonym of “smart”.
The outcome is clearly illegal under the disparate impact doctrine.
I am not sure what your position is here. That my desire to hire smart people is mistaken? That my ability to identify smart people is not be trusted?
I don’t have a clue who ‘you’ are. For the firefighting department we started with, I challenge both inferences. And I’m baffled at having to spell this out.
In this subthread “I” means a fictional business manager in a hypothetical situation. Specifically, that manager wants to hire smart people and runs head-first into a disparate impact case.
Perhaps you should consider that other people think differently than you and often start from different assumptions, too.
Are “you” using race as a proxy for IQ, using actual IQ, or using evidence of domain relevant knowledge?
I notice that real world employers tend to emphasise the last. Rightly, because it avoids the Spolskyan problem of “smart, but doesn’t get things done”
(a) No; (b) Mostly; (c) Somewhat.
Domain knowledge functions as a hard cutoff at the lower end (if you need an accountant, you need someone who can do accounting) but the higher it is, the less important it becomes unless you’re filling a position at the bleeding edge of a particular field.
Domain knowledge is also not the same thing as work habits, effectiveness, etc.
If you are not filling a position at the bleeding edge, you wouldn’t need high domainknowledge. I don’t see why you would need high IQ either.
Work habits, etc, can be judged by someone’s ability to get things done, which can be judged from their resume as per standard recruitment procedures.
You seem to think IQ is a better indicator. Why?
These haven’t been as extensively studied, but anecdotal evidence suggests these are also correlated with race. Furthermore, since judging these things is obviously going to be more subjective than looking at the results of a test, an employer relying on these is going to be even more open to accusations of racism.
Not necessarily high, but higher.
Basically, each job has an appropriate IQ range. It’s better to pick people from the higher end of that range than from the lower end.
No, I don’t think you can effectively evaluate things like work habits on the basis of a “normal” resume. There is a reason people are hired after interviews and, sometimes, test periods and not just on the basis of their resumes.
IQ is not a better indicator of work habits. However it is a good indicator of the contribution that a person can make to your organization. To make obvious observations, people with higher IQ work faster, make fewer mistakes, need less things explained to them, can handle the unexpected better, etc. etc.
Real worldemployers are careful not to hire unqualified people, because they get .bored, leave etc. I don’t see why thatwouldnt stretch to IQ.
So an antisocial geek with a high IQ would be great in customer services? Well, other wouldn’t. Real world employers have a more multidimensional view.
The US govt passed legislation that no one could argue for?
I think Eugine is arguing that they passed legislation for reasons that are not rational.
I think that only applies in certain countries.